Month: May 2010

From Obsolete Technology, New Science, NOVA, PBS“Today, an engineer named Dennis Wingo is working to resurrect that data. He co-leads the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project–which, as the name implies, is working to pry all that old data off of the tapes. So far, he’s been successful, thanks to a combination of skill and pure luck. Wingo’s team located one of the only NASA computer tape drives left in existence, and carefully restored it to its former glory in order to digitize the old tapes onto modern hard drives.”

“We took 40 year old data tapes, tape drives that had been in a garage for 30 years, found elderly engineers, and reverse-engineered ancient technology to provide enhanced imagery from the five Lunar Orbiter missions in a fashion – and resolution – inconceivable at the time that the missions were conducted.”

“Keith Cowing talks about the kind of hacks made famous by the Apollo 13 mission, instances where the crew had to improvise using materials at hand. He discusses the following: Skylab Rescue – the umbrella used to replace solar insulation and boating tools bought at a local marina; Syncom Rescue – tools made out of plastic and duct tape; Apollo 13 CO2 removal, use of LEM engine, etc.; Apollo lunar rover fender repair; STS-120 EVA solar panel repair, and ISS camera tracker made from a power tool. Cowing also talks about some of his own projects including the greenhouse he designed and built on Devon Island (and some serious hacks) near the North Pole. Currently, he’s working in partnership with NASA Ames to restore a 1960’s era Titan I ICBM & convert it for educational use.”
More information: moonviews.com, nasahackerspace.org

23 May Update from Keith and Dennis: If you were at our presentation today at Make Faire and are interested in this Titan 1 project please leave your information in the comment field below. We will save this information in order to be able to contact you – but we won’t publish it online. Thanks!Spacing out at Maker Faire“One of the de facto themes of this year’s Faire, so perfectly represented by our Gothic Raygun Rocketship design centerpiece, is space and space hacking. This serves as the perfect lead-in to our upcoming DIY Space issues of MAKE. Here, our roving court photographer, Blake Maloof, captures some of the space-related happenings around the Faire.”Famous Hacks at NASA Center Stage Sunday 11:00 AM – 11:20 AM“Keith Cowing will talk about the kind of hacks made famous by the Apollo 13 mission, instances where the crew had to improvise using materials at hand. He’ll discuss the following: Skylab Rescue – the umbrella used to replace solar insulation and boating tools bought at a local marina; Syncom Rescue – tools made out of plastic and duct tape; Apollo 13 CO2 removal, use of LEM engine, etc.; Apollo lunar rover fender repair; STS-120 EVA solar panel repair, and ISS camera tracker made from a power tool. Keith will also talk about some of his own projects including the greenhouse he designed and built on Devon Island (and some serious hacks) near the North Pole. Currently, he’s working in partnership with NASA Ames to restore a 1960’s era Titan I ICBM & convert it for educational use.”McMoon (Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project) Center Stage Sunday 11:30 AM – 11:50 AM“Dennis Wingo (with some help from Keith Cowing) will talk about the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. This project started with rescuing tapes containing data from the first lunar survey but required repairing tape drives and writing software to decode the data. Learn about the images they were able to recover and the expertise required to make the repairs, locates parts, etc. This project is housed at a former McDonald’s restaurant at NASA Ames, now known as McMoon.”

This high resolution image, subframe 2111_H3, was taken by Lunar Orbiter 2 on 22 November 1966 at 13:49:11 GMT. As you can see from this full resolution enlargement, objects as small as a meter or two in size can be seen when the resolution of the original image is approx. 1 meter/pixel. The image below shows the location of this enlarged area.